With the advent of the computer age, computer and software users have grown accustomed to user-friendly software applications that help then write, calculate, organize, prepare presentations, send and receive electronic mail, make music, and the like. For example, modern electronic word processing applications allow users to prepare a variety of useful documents. Modem spreadsheet applications allow users to enter, manipulate, and organize data. Modem electronic slide presentation applications allow users to create a variety of slide presentations containing text, pictures, data or other useful objects.
Methods and systems have been developed for representing documents and associated properties generated by such applications according to various formatting types. For example, documents may be represented in binary format, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) format, rich text format (RTF), Extensible Markup Language format (XML), and the like. In addition, there are many components that make up such documents, including paragraphs, tables, styles, fonts, lists and the like. Some components of a document reference other components for providing a first component with structural limitations. For example, a paragraph in a document might reference a particular formatting type or style setting that defines how the paragraph is to appear in a document. For another example, a paragraph component of a document may be part of a particular list structure in a document. Because there are a number of properties and objects that other objects of a document may reference, such as styles, there is typically a need in a document for a header in which various properties and objects, such as styles and font definitions, are located.
Unfortunately, a problem occurs when a user attempts to add additional content to a particular document, for example, a paragraph, text portion, image, chart, and the like, where the additional content is formatted according to a formatting that is different from the formatting of the document to which the additional content is being added. For example, a given application may store all rich text in HTML format. To take content from a document generated by that application to a non-HTML application, the HTML-formatted content must be transformed into another format. Otherwise, if the HTML-formatted content, for example, is added to a document formatted according to another formatting, for example, XML, the original formatting of the added content may be lost, or the additional content may fail to load altogether.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.